Kid Detectives: The Case of the Sinking Nation
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0This whole Crystal Skull-2012-Mayan Calendar-Aztec Curses nonsense needs to come to an end. The Aztecs and the Mayans were certainly advanced people in their own way and they deserve our respect and recognition. However, if they were not prescient enough to foresee the coming of Pizarro or the seemingly random collapse of their entire empire, what can they possibly offer modern humans in terms of accurate and useful prophecy? I posit that the answer is nothing.
Humanity, unlike the rest of the natural world, is obsessed with its own demise. Consciousness seems to come with an angry hooting ape attached to its back. That ape likes to remind a great many people in a most impolite fashion that we are going to die someday. For some reason this ape also thinks that we are all going to die together and that this demise is just around the corner. Look at any number of myths and stories from any number of cultures. The apocalyptic scenario is ubiquitous across all of them. You’ve got floods and fire and the leviathan of the Bible and similar events in the other Abrahamic traditions. You’ve also got Ragnarok from the Vikings, flood myths from Native Americans, apocalypse in the form of cold and darkness from Asia. This method of thinking is everywhere.
Here in the “modern” West, minds seem to occupy two primary spaces. The first involves the Biblical Apocalypse scenario with Jesus and the Devil engaging in some badass kung fu for our souls. The second camp seems obsessed with 2012 and the strange ‘artifacts’ of ancient cultures such as The Crystal Skulls. Somehow, like a Venn Diagram of idiocy, there is overlap. I’ve heard of and talked to people that are simultaneously very worried about 2012 and who are, at the same time, awaiting the return of Christ-Jesus, Lord of Hosts. Trying to wrap my head around that is like trying to grasp a lively fly betwixt chopsticks.
The Crystal Skulls themselves are terribly interesting until you actually read about the legitimate experiments performed on them: experiments that have all said that they were created sometime in the mid 19th century with rotary tools. And yet, people still pray to these things and fear them. Rather than look at ourselves, many of us still look to the sky and to the ancient world looking for our doom.
But, I ask, if the ‘ancients’ were so goddamn wise, why are they all dead and gone? Maybe they, like us, were all just phenomenally lazy. Maybe some things never really change.
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Not to mention that according to the Aztecs and Mayans, the world was supposed to have ended about five times now…
hahaha! Thank you for that!
I take it someone was a Netherlands fan?
I find this especially amusing, what with Spain just winning the World Cup. COINCIDENCE? Yeah, pretty much.
It’s because the entire country couldn’t run away because they all had broken legs / ankles from bumping into any other person even briefly.
Not the siestas! What have you done, Lil K!? hahaha
AAH! Scary avatar!!
-I- think it’s marvelous hahaha
I think YOU’RE marvelous.
I think siestas are marvelous.
Sad at the limit of replies :*(
I’ll just have to reply to my own!
I swear I’ve learned more from these web comics than I did in school.
lol yeah, probably
…All those skull made me think of was the Phantom movie with Billy Zane…
I think I read somewhere that the Mayan’s never really predicted that the world would end at 2012.
More like there would be a great spiritual enlightenment… or something…
People are just stupid because an ancient civilization that was extraordinarily good at keeping the time got lazy and didn’t want to do it anymore and they read too much into it.
I agree wif snickerdoodle here. The Aztecs were probably like “a calander going to 2012 seems like enough for now, we’ll just add more when we get there” but alas they died before given the chance. People today just tried to read too far into it and came up with insane zombie apocolypse theories. Just like how modern art Is read too far into… Modern art bugs me.. Grr
Oh I meant mayans not Aztecs.. :/ on another note I realized my native Mexican heritage means I am decendent of the mighty Aztec people yay!
I just looked at my calendar and found that it stops at Dec 31, 2010. Oh Noes, it must be the end of the world!
Ahahah!
On the one hand, I don’t think that dismissing some sort of astronomical prediction of apocalypse based on observation of the sky because they didn’t predict the coming of the Spanish makes complete sense, but on the other I completely agree with you that this 2012 nonsense is ridiculous.
And Spain had it coming, the bastards.
At least the supernatural causes we might die of are less depressing than the ones we might do to ourselves.
And with supernatural ones, there’s always the chance that we might get eaten by dragons, or a wolf might swallow the moon, which would probably be a lot more entertaining than boring old mushroom clouds.
It’s an interesting reflection on our psyche though, isn’t it? “I’m not going unless I can take the rest of you with me” is a sentiment that makes me feel as though evolution dropped the ball somewhere.
hahaha I love this reasoning so much!
My understanding of the End of the World, based on the translations from a Maya calendar (“a Maya calendar”, as in “there are more than one”), is that it comes from a similar thinking that the world will also end on the 31st of December because there are no more pages (unless you count that little bonus month that is in the corner, so if you do then the world will end on January 31 but everything will be real tiny?).
Maybe people should stop thinking everything is so lame that it be would be better if it were just all done and over with. That is lame. Do you know what is not lame? Riding a bicycle.
I love bicycles! I ride one every day.
*shun*
There use to be a great genera of literature in the Middle ages all about the Apocalypse and how to get yourself prepared. I think it is called “eschatological literature” although I’m not sure I’d need to reread my Medieval lit notes. There are hundreds of manuscripts that first predicted the end of the world, would describe in great detail (much to the love of any medievalist), and then there would be a brief sentence at the back saying something like, “Are you prepared?” or “Remember it could happen to-morrow!” For some reason this stuff went away with the Renaissance when they decided that allegory wasn’t fun anymore.
To be honest I couldn’t care less about the 2012 stuff hell I encourage it. As long as I get to see new apocalypse scenarios.
I’ve always been more a fan of the Norse end of the world. I would very much like to get my chance to kill a giant, or maybe even something more prestigious.
Or I could side with the less than friendly ones and kill myself some Einherjar. That’d be one to tell the grandkids.
my theory…mayans ran out of space to write.or got tired like every says.i find the crystal skull sht is stupid.they are just amazing pieces of art.by the time 2012 comes many of the people that truely believe in it will suicide(hope that non of them are your friend or family.)and when that happens call me an ass cuz i will laugh.keep up the great work homie fo shizzel
That was pretty racist, man. Low.
Every time I hear yet another prediction of imminent doom I point out that 100% of such predictions so far have been wrong.
you are my favorite person!
After rigorous research (i.e none at all) I have concluded that on 2012, the Aztecs will rise from their graves to take revenge on the Spanish. Either that, or the dinosaurs are coming back. Yeah, dinosaurs.
Or Jesus on a dinosaur. No, Wait! Zombie Jesus on a dinosaur. Now that’s a judgment day!
End of the World? Global Warming? CO2 is not poison. It’s us. The plants use it for photosynthesis, and breath out O2, we eat the plants, and breath in the O2. All of the C-and-the-O2 could end up in us, and other animals. The only way to significantly lower CO2 is more plants, less people, and less livestock. Politicians and so-called activists won’t tell people to eat veggies-only and stop having babies, so that there will be a world for your future babies, because nobody would listen anyway. We aren’t going to get there just by changing light bulbs. And some fools think that bio-diesel is green: as if taking already sequestered carbon out of a lower-(than-gasoline)-energy-fuel and putting it back into the atmosphere will make there be less carbon in the atmosphere. The thing is: I don’t really care. No. Really. I mean it. We all die someday: the difference between the status-quo, and the end of the world, is simply a matter of timing.
I always just thought that their civilization marked the beginning and the end of a time with a catastrophic event… like an earthquake, mini-iceage, etc. After that, their calendar would start over again in a new age. People just get all ruffled up over silly things that are silly.
I… don’t know why I didn’t see this gem of a comic strip until now.
The crystal skulls, or whatever other strange ancient artifacts people believed would bring about our doom. This reminds me of the Japanese video game Persona 2: Innocent Sin, where apparently a weird cult is trying to collect the crystal skulls to create a new world by following the Mayan prophesy.
And, it turns out that really, it was just rumor, which people believed so badly, it somehow manifested itself and become a “reality”
This reminds me strangely of a book I read, Life As We Knew It.